Murdered gang members hold key to terror secrets

As the shroud still remains over the motive behind the murder of Sunil Joshi, an aide of Swami Aseemanand and a contact of RSS leader Indresh Kumar, it now surfaces that yet another person in the gang was eliminated.

While Sunil Joshi’s murder is now well-publicised — though not sufficiently explained by the Madhya Pradesh police — the death of his friend Ramprasad Kaloda alias Ramji is shrouded in deeper mystery. Sunil was shot dead in December, 2007 in Dewas district while Ramji was found dead near railway track under Gautampura police station of Indore district in March 2008. Ramji had allegedly supplied explosives to Sunil for the blast in Ajmer.

The Rajasthan Anti Terrorist Squad (ATS) that is investigating the case believes that cracking these two murders will explain a lot of missing links in the investigations into terror attacks carries out by people linked to the RSS. “We are on a lookout for two persons. Once we get them Kaloda's murder mystery will be solved,” Satyendra Singh Ranawat, Additional Superintendent of Police (ASP) Rajasthan ATS told HT on phone.

The Rajasthan ATS charge-sheet in the Ajmer blast case has mentioned that the explosives used for terror strike were stored in the cowshed by Ramji on Sunil Joshi's instructions. This was revealed during interrogation of one of the blast accused Lokesh Sharma, and the matter has been taken up for further investigation, the charge sheet adds.

Ramji was a close aide of Sunil Joshi and part of the gang involved in Ajmer, Mecca and the Samjautha blast cases.

The Rajasthan ATS suspect that both Joshi and Kaloda were eliminated by their own people so that the terror link was snapped and involvement of prominent Hindutava activists such as Aseemanand could be hushed up.

In Sunil Joshi's case the MP police had filed a closure report, citing lack of evidence and clues to solve the mystery. The case was kept on backburner by MP police till recently when the Rajasthan ATS picked up Gujarat- based Harshad Solanki in connection with the Ajmer blast case.